Monday, 29 March 2010

The Janakaraliya (People’s Theatre) drama festival will come to the Lionel Wendt theatre from January 12 – 15, 2010, with a new generation of young bilingual actors and a string of stage drama’s crafted to overcome communal and language differences in Sri Lanka.

On December 18, Janakaraliya staged මැටි කරත්තය/ Meti Karaththaya (clay cart), at the Lionel Wendt theatre to a star studded audience, ahead of the drama festival.

True to its promise of bringing ‘quality theatre’ to Sri Lanka’s war-weary populations, Janakaraliya’s Meti Karaththaya displayed excellent theatre craft, including well trained young actors (even up to the single child actor), entertaining play acting, creative stage props, and beautiful costumes.

Typical of Janakaraliya plays the Meti Karaththaya cast is made up of both Sinhala and Tamil young people.

This means suddenly hearing a decided Tamil accent in some parts of the the Sinhala play, and vise versa. Although a little distracting at first, this technique actually adds to the richness of the overall production.

One wonders whether the ancient author of this play wanted to transmit a warning message into the future through his play - about rare cases of serial murderers, because traditional Sri Lankan/Indian society does not officially acknowledge the existence of this tendency.

Meti Karaththaya itself, is an ancient play (AD 400), supposed to have been written in Sanskrit, under a different name, by a King called Shudraka (ශුද්‍රක). But it may have been written even earlier (AD 300) by a scholar called Bhasa ( භාස ) .

It was translated into Sinhala by Mr Piyadasa Nishshanka and crafted into the current play, Meti Karaththaya, by veteran dramatist and founder of Janakaraliya, Parakrama Niriella.